Upper Coonoor

I did some work on my project book. These are the first pages, Getting There. From India; to the state of Tamil Nadu; from Chennai to Coimbaore by plane; the road trip across the plains from Coimbatore to Mettupalayam; the steep, winding drive up the hills to Coonoor. I traced the maps onto my book-paper by taping the pages to my computer monitor. It's just a beginning, but I feel that I'm underway:

This is my hand-drawn map, of the area where my morning walks begin. Coonoor is a 'hill station'-- a cool place in the hill where the British colonizers could escape from the heat. It is very hard to find a level surface anywhere. I don't have the skills to draw the topography, so I thought I'd try this.

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I like to make my own sketchbooks, using odd papers of different sizes. Once I made an entire book out of Indian wedding invitations. For my project here, I plan to make maps of the small south Indian hill-station of Coonoor, especially Upper Coonoor. I will use pages which fold out; small maps of morning walks in accordian-style pages, tucked into envelopes in the book pop-ups. I will illustrate the map with drawings, photographs, descriptions, tweets, whatever I can think of. In the end I may have something like a map-oriented carnet de voyage.